Speed Reading - Why?

Gisela Jia

Reading is not just about recognizing characters. 

True reading is reading with comprehension. 

When you turn printed characters into sounds, and your brain can readily compute the meaning of the strings of sounds, you're giving yourself precious language input that strength your sense of the language.

Because of this, once students have met the listening and speaking requirements of each level, it helps listening and speaking if they learn how to read the passages, in the form of stories or conversations.

But reading things slowly is not going to help much. It can even be harmful to you.

Each time a student goes through a story slowly, it unfairly reinforces an idea - that reading Chinese is hard and boring. 

Why boring? Think about all the reading you enjoy - how often do you have to stop and wonder about what how a word is pronounced or what a word means?

When you have to struggle at the basic level, how can your mind have the extra energy to process the meaning of the story, let alone the deeper level nuances that have the potential to make you wonder and marvel.

So, when you read slowly and laboriously, interesting content becomes Ma Ma Hu Hu (so-so), and so-so content becomes boring. 

More over, as a teacher, I have rarely seen a Level 6 student doing well who struggled with reading in Level 5, and the same applies to all pairs of neighboring levels.

So how to get faster with reading? There is no other trick but repeatedly reading the same thing.

How strange is this idea? If reading is for fun, how can you read something twice? 

But remember, to all of us, Chinese is a foreign/second/non-dominant language that requires practicing like music and swimming. 

Recently we started a Speed Reading project - teachers, parents or students themselves time the reading of stories.

Most stories have been read by most students who have learned those stories.  Teachers identified the fastest record for each story, and put them in this table.

CCBG Student Speed Reading Record

You can see that, some students merely needed one or two minutes to read stories in Level 2 and 3. Interestingly, some students could read the much longer and harder stories in Level 5 also in 2-3 minutes.

This is precisely what growth in reading fluency means.

What is also extremely interesting and telling is that, the records are held by many different students. Some students, although slow in reading many other stories, do hold the records for one or two stories, towering over some very fluent peers.

What does this mean? This means that, these students, if they put their mind to it, they can become fluent in all stories. But somehow, they decided to just put in the effort to be the fastest for one story.

So, next time we see a slow reader, let's remember that he/she may be holding a speed reading record. He/she has the potential, which has not been used enough.

Teachers are aware that records and comparisons can be sensitive to some. Students do have the right not to participate, or have their record logged in, or have their real name logged in (one uses 无名氏 wu ming shi in her/his record).

We also know the current table of the fastest speed is only a limited view. When teachers have more time, we'll calculate and share the average for each story.

Do you know what's the world record of 100 meter dash? 9.58 seconds. I bumped into this information just the other day. 

Although I never hope I can run that fast, I know that Usain Bolt is a human, and he ran that fast without cheating. So I know it's humanely possible to cover 100 meters' of distance under 10 seconds. 

It helps me to know this because given I'm a healthy person with no disabilities, if I run 100 meters in 9.58 MINUTES, I should think about how to become faster. It's also fun to think that it's always possible for me to be a bit closer to Bolt's speed than where I'm now, with some running practice.

So, with the publication of the record reading speed for these 80 stories, CCBG teachers and I hope to inspire some of you to be faster readers!